The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  I am an old man now, my dreams the same today as they were when we worked at the Palace, a one-reeler with people, rhythm, and music, sights that play over and over. Girls. Horses. The woman in the green-checked apron holding my hand, bending to stroke my head and my face with her other hand. Her departure. Boarding school. The run to Maggie’s. All that was tied up with the rhythm of work, as I danced with their ghosts, living and dead, danced to the silent song of lives led and lives being lived, accompanied by the drop-roll of bowling balls and the clatter and crash of downed pins.

  Before we went to Minneapolis to look for work, me and Cousin Vernon lived in Duluth, with Vernon’s mother, Maggie, and his little brother, Biik. We’d both quit Harrod school, Vernon when he turned sixteen and me the last time I ran away and those bastards finally got tired of hunting me down. We were ready for the army and ready to get into the war but we were too young, and we were really mad about that. Vernon was going to enlist as soon as he turned seventeen, when Maggie could sign for him to go. His brothers Sonny and George were fighting in Africa and in the Pacific, and his cousins, all of the LaForce boys, were overseas, too. Me and Vernon, we were useless, us, and were waiting until the army would take us, like I said. I was going to have to wait even longer than Vernon because I didn’t have a mother to sign for me; meanwhile, we were looking for something to do. Vernon decided that he could stop living off Maggie and we could go down to Minneapolis to look for work.

  “I’m gonna get a job, Ma, and then I’m gonna send you some money so you won’t have to work all the time,” Vernon told her, “and me and Sam are gonna get ourselves a place to stay.”

  “Mmmm, that’s nice,” she said.

  Maggie, she had us each take a blanket to roll our clothes in, packed us some food, and gave us five bucks, too; that was Maggie. She told us to go find Louis when we got there; he was living at the Holland House Hotel, close to all his friends on Franklin Avenue, the Av, where the Indians in Minneapolis came and went, all the Chippewas and Sioux, Boozhoos and Howkolas we called them sometimes, and Indians from some other places, too. There was all of a sudden a lot of Indians in Minneapolis then, during the Second World War, coming and going from all the reservations, making money working in the munitions plants and factories, living sometimes six people to a room, sharing with people like me and Vernon who came to work, too, and helping out their relatives back home.

  We told Biik he had to stay with Maggie and go to school in the fall. He was pretty mad about that, like we were about not getting to go into the army.

  It took us two days and four rides to hitch down to Minneapolis. We slept overnight behind a gas station in Cambridge. Early in the morning the owner woke us up and told us to get the hell out of there. We jumped up pretty quick and gathered up our stuff, that guy saying all the while, “I mean it, you bums, get the hell off my property or I’m getting the cops over here,” till we were out of his sight. Down the street there was a bakery where we bought a loaf of bread and some doughnuts to eat on the road. We ate the bread while we stood at the side of the road just outside of Cambridge with our thumbs out and shared the doughnuts with the farmer who picked us up.

  The farmer took us past Forest Lake, and then a Watkins salesman in a checkered suit picked us up and took us all the way into the city. By that time it was getting dark but we knew where the Av was, and it wasn’t hard to find the Holland House. Louis was back from work, and he was glad to see us, asked us what Maggie was up to and if the LaForces were still up on the reservation or what. He introduced us to a couple of men from up north who worked with him at the grain elevators (‘Like you to meet my son, Vernon, and Sam Sweet. Maynard’s boy—you remember Maynard”) and a couple of Sioux from South Dakota. The Sioux were very polite; they shook our hands and told us they were glad to meet us. Louis and the Sioux said if we wanted to go down to the grain elevators with them in the morning we could probably get a job killing rats. “No rabbits down there; if youse boys get hungry youse are gonna have to settle for rats.” The Sioux started laughing hysterically at this good joke on their buddies the Chippewas.

  We slept on the floor in Louis’s room that night; it was all right, a pretty good time. Louis was a lot of fun, and we sat around talking till pretty late. When we got up early the bathroom was full of men getting ready to work; a couple of the younger men were wet-combing their hair, but most were just washing their faces and coughing into the sinks; their jobs weren’t the kind you had to comb your hair for.

  We got on at the grain elevators just like that and spent our first day in Minneapolis chasing rats and beating them to death with shovels, work that just wore you out. Our job was to kill the rats that lived in the elevators, some of them growing to the size of dogs because of all that grain they ate. The foreman told us each to pick up a shovel, stay out of the grain shovelers’ way, and make sure no rats, dead or alive, got shoveled into the grain that was going to the mill. “We don’t want nothing like rats getting ground up into the flour, boys. You make sure that don’t happen.”

  We envied Louis his nice job shoveling grain, where the men inhaled particles of grain dust so fine that it floated like a yellow fog as soon as the shoveling started. Within minutes of starting work the men started to cough. Then they hawked the rest of the day, some of them until they puked, which stopped the cough but not for long. They wore handkerchiefs tied over their faces, like bank robbers. Louis kept his handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth in a square knotted above the backs of his ears and then at the back of the neck. He said it worked for him, and he never puked. He did sweat, though, soaked right through his overalls and shirt, and that fine grain powder stuck to it so that he looked like a big piece of grain himself.

  Vernon got the first one, a rat that didn’t look like any rat we ever saw before. There we were, standing behind Louis, holding our shovels like baseball bats, and Louis was pumping his arms and moving that grain, shoveling like a madman, like all the shovelers were, and in about a minute this big bushy rat almost the size of a porcupine but fast, man that thing was fast, dodged Louis’s shovel and ran right between us. Vernon swung the shovel in this big arc over his right shoulder down toward the floor, skimming right to the rat’s path, and pow! That thing was knocked right out; got it right in the face. Vernon raised his eyebrows at me and smiled, then shoveled that thing up off the floor and carried it over to where the foreman said we were supposed to start our rat pile. “Giizis, heyey-wah!” Louis called to him. “My son, there. Wait till he gets in the army!” he said to the shoveler next to him, this Grand Portage niijii with arms like Popeye’s.

  “Shimaaganish, that’s him,” answered the niijii, and began to sing, “Slap that Jap off the map.”

  “Wa ha ha, Benito’s jaw!” Louis continued for him in a deep voice, to sound funny, and they started to laugh like crazy, working their shovels so fast they glinted and twinkled in the haze of grain dust.

  I didn’t like killing rats; there was this one that I beaned pretty good but didn’t kill it when I hit it, so it lay there twitching and heaving, really suffering, so I had to bash its head in with the shovel. Jeez, that was bad, and there were more like that, too. I had smears of blood on my overalls, especially on the legs; Vernon was splattered all the way up to his face. He really killed a lot of rats, but he ran a lot more than I did and where I got to feeling worn out he got tired to the point he was like crazy drunk. By dinner break he was so wound up from all that running around that his hind end appeared to hover about a half-inch above the wooden bench we sat on to eat the lard sandwiches Louis had packed in the bucket, and his eyes, red-rimmed and teary, blinked excitedly. “You see all them rats? Pow! Ka-pow!” he laughed hoarsely. “P’shoom! Ak-akak-ak-ak!”

  “You gonna eat, or what?” Louis asked.

  Vernon turned clear around and threw up back of the bench.

  After dinner break I looked around at some of the rat killers working with other shovelers, and they didn’t look sick, or excited,
or even especially tired. They looked like nothing but overall sacks stiff with sweat that dried out and got covered the next day and the day after that with more sweat and blood and grain dust, overall sacks charging and chasing rats, overall sacks holding inside hope that someday they might work their way up to shovelers.

  They paid us in cash at the end of the day; we hosed off our clothes the best we could and washed our hands and faces, dunked our heads under the sink faucets to rinse the dust out of our ears and hair, and walked out of there with Louis and his buddies to get something to eat. We had hamburgers and fried potatoes at this bar near the Holland, Eddie’s, but Vernon and me were too young for a beer so we left when they started buying rounds. We walked over to the Holland, and when the manager saw us come in the door, he said we couldn’t stay there unless we paid for a room, he was sick of that bunch of Indians from Duluth bringing all their relatives in to sleep for free, next one he saw he was calling the cops, and here’s your stuff, boys, if you haven’t got two bits apiece for your room take it and get out, so we picked up our blanket rolls and left.

  We walked a while around toward downtown till we found a place to sleep in a park. All snug rolled up in my blanket between Vernon and a squatty little pine tree I looked up at the stars, same ones as were shining down that very same minute on everybody at home, and started to think how if we wanted to kill rats we could be doing that at the terminals in Duluth. But I wasn’t ready to go home yet.

  “Hey, Vernon.”

  “Wegonen, Cousin?”

  “Let’s not kill rats tomorrow, Cousin; how about it?”

  “Okay by me.” Vernon was always very easy to get along with.

  There was a skinny, worried-looking guy leaning a handwritten cardboard sign next to the doorway to the Palace Bowl. “pinesters wanted,” it said.

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “Pin boys, we’re looking for pinsetters, somebody to set pins, need them right now. You fellas want a job?” His forehead wrinkles moved up and down, opening and closing like a squeezebox when he talked, his voice high and light. “We had two pin boys just enlisted in the navy, need a couple of pin boys right away. You fellas want a job? It’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  Me and Vernon followed the skinny guy inside. He stood us by the door and told us, “Wait here, stand right here, I’ll go get the owner.” First, though, he lit a cigarette.

  The alley had six lanes and a lunch counter with a bar at one end. It was pretty quiet in there, nobody at the counter eating, just a couple of men at the far lane changing into bowling shoes, and the wood floor creaked as we shifted from foot to foot, waiting. Dark in there. Kind of restful, too, and generally kind of pleasant, was my impression for a second or two. Then I took in my first breath inside the door and my lungs filled with the heaviness of an inhaled large animal, impossible to expel, unthinkable to even cough. The place had a smell that sunk to my chest and stuck in my throat; it felt almost as thick as grain dust but denser, wetter. What was it, anyway? Old wet dog, cigarette butts put out in dirty plates, mothballs, sauerkraut, lye soap, sweat, tired feet. Beer and boiled egg boogit.

  But no rat blood. We could get used to that. In the meantime, I just breathed waves of that heavy wetness in and out through my mouth; the taste was bad but not as powerful as the smell.

  Vernon was breathing through only his mouth, too. “Dice-lookig blace, eh,” he commented. Vernon was always very easy to please.

  We could see the back of this big heavy grunting guy bent over behind the lunch counter, replacing an empty beer keg. Skinny walked over and knelt next to him, helping to lift and push the full keg with his long arms, white and dry looking as cigarettes.

  “Aaawwrrggghhh,” we heard the big guy groan. “Gaaa that sonovabitch is heavy … rrrggghh.” Then, “Okay, I got it I got it I got it … let go let ‘er go let ‘er go.” They stood up. The big guy had a lit cigarette in his mouth, too. We would find out that everybody at the Palace kept a cigarette going; the cloud of smoke around each person’s head really helped with the smell.

  Skinny said, “Montie, there’s a couple of Indian boys over by the door want to set pins. Fellas, this is Mr. Mountbatten.”

  The big guy looked us over. “Where you boys from?”

  “Duluth,” Vernon answered.

  “Where else?”

  “Mozhay Point, Lost Lake.”

  “Where else?”

  “County boys’ home, up by Duluth.”

  “Harrod School.”

  “That a reform school?” he asked.

  No, a lot worse. “No sir, it’s one of them Indian schools.”

  “You ever been in trouble?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You boys pinsetters? You ever set pins before?”

  “No sir, never done it before, but we seen it done.”

  “You start today, both of youse, right now?”

  “Yes sir, we can do that.”

  “You got yourselves a job. Follow me.”

  Mr. Mountbatten took us through a doorway at the end of the lanes and pointed at the guy working behind the rows of bowling pins. “Punk. Shake hands with the new boys.” And he told us the Palace rules: Punk was the lead; the three of us, me, him, and Vernon, covered for each other; the Palace was open every night; no smoking in the pits; no drinking ever; we had to wear a shirt whenever we left the pits. We could sleep in the storage room with Punk if we wanted to help Ingrum, the skinny guy, with cleaning and anything else he needed done. “Show ‘em how it’s done, Punk; hurry up before more people come in.” He left.

  “We got a customer waiting. Watch how I do this. Gotta do this quick. It starts to get busy in here right around now.” Punk took off his shirt, rolled up his pants legs to his knees (“gets hot in here”), and hopped over the partition into the next pit to stand crouched, bent forward, to look through the lined-up pins in the window at the man who was beginning his approach. When the man set the bowling ball down and it came rolling toward the pins, Punk grabbed hold of the bar hanging from the low ceiling and half-jumped, half-swung himself up to a bench nailed high into the back wall, lifting his feet and getting out of the way as the ball crashed into the pins, half of them falling right at Punk, back into the pit, where he had been standing. Punk jumped down off the bench and picked up the ball, rolled it through an opening next to the pin window down the ball return back to the man, who picked it up and began his second approach. He crouched, watching the man throw his second ball, jumped out of the way. Nine pins down. Punk jumped down, picked them up, two or three to a hand, and set them back up. He rolled the ball back and stood crouched for the next frame. “Got it? Watch me again, then one of youse try it.”

  It wasn’t too bad once you learned the rhythm, though like Punk said, you had to pay attention to what was going on. It was hard on the shoulders, but harder still on the hands. After a while mine felt like claws, curved to the shape of the pins, and stiff, and they sure hurt, but that kept my mind off my shoulders, which felt like I was carrying boulders on each. Vernon picked it up quick; he always did everything like that, but he was the first one to get hit by a pin when he forgot to get his legs all the way up. Punk saw him sitting on the floor of the pit with his head on his knees, rocking back and forth, and jumped like a pogo stick across three lane pits to pick up the pins. “You gonna make it, Chief?” Vernon’s face was all twisted up by the pain and his eyes were half shut with it, too, but he nodded and got up off the floor to crouch for the next frame. Punk shook his shoulder, half embraced him. “You’re gonna be all right, Chief; here, keep moving, walk it off.”

  We each took two lanes, and when they were both full, we didn’t stop moving at all; it took everything we had, for hours and hours, even days it seemed; twice the skinny guy showed up with hot dogs, which we ate between games. We drank water from a bucket in the corner, guzzling and slurping from the metal dipper, and kept it up until all of a sudden the place was down to one lane and Punk told Vernon to sit dow
n, he’d take that one and finish up.

  The last people bowling were Ingrum and his date, this woman I’d seen through the pin window sitting at the counter smoking and sipping coffee most of the night until the bowlers were gone and the lanes were empty. She peered down the lane into the pit window before she picked up her ball. “Punk! Punk, how are you, honey?” She had a huge smile with a lot of teeth, and an enormous bust, like two bowling balls in her shirt.